I'm a little new in this area. I have a virtual machine centos5.1 that doesn't come with make or any compiler... basically stripped down. It doesn't come with any install packages like yum, rpm or apt. In order to install 'make', you have to have a valid compiler like gcc. However, in order to compile GCC, you need to have 'make'. How do I go about installing these dev tools?

Be aware that just getting make in there will solve nothing. You also need GCC (among other things) installed for compiling GCC. So you have to start with precompiled binaries. And you cannot do all this and still have the system stripped down.
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FabelNov 15 '11 at 22:23

Seems like yum is the 'easiest' way to go, but I don't have rpm. Does it come compiled already? Seems like yum would be best suited if it is compiled in the target machine.
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user17924Nov 13 '09 at 17:30

Ok, I think I'll be at this for hours. I'm just going to setup a new centos and install zenoss afterwards instead of using their virtual appliance.
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user17924Nov 13 '09 at 17:45

so, basically, setup another centos (similar to the appliance) compile it there and copy to the other machine... how about the shared modules, won't I have to mess with that too?
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user17924Nov 13 '09 at 17:21

if its zenoss it must be x86? you're better off just downloading the binaries precompiled, but even better off getting yum.
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Colin PickardNov 13 '09 at 17:25

I'll have to check on the those precompiled binaries... I'm also checking how to install yum without any package management...
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user17924Nov 13 '09 at 17:31

It doesn't have to be another Centos box. You could cross-compile to x86 from anything that will run gcc. Debian, RHEL, Ubuntu, Slackware. Cygwin even.
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ReynoldsNov 13 '09 at 17:32